Hi there!
I have a Mac and as everyone with a mac can tesify, it's awesome. So clearly now that I am in the market for a nice cheap digtal video camera I would like it to work on my Mac. Im looking right no at the Panasonic SD5, which according to the salesguy is far superior recording wise with its SD card to a minidv (can anyone elaborate why?), but i heard that its possible that it will only load onto the Panasonic software included rather than iMovie.. which would man that I would have to go back to the minidv format which has been giving me endless grief in my old video camera (alot of footage was lost with what i assume was a faulty recorder recording segmented lines through all the old footage so it was an unusable montage... ofcourse that camera is now dead but i still want a recording mode a bit more relialble)
Thanks for any help!
David

I can't find anything specific about the Panasonic SD5, but ifthe Mac doesn't startup a program whenyou connect the camera, itjust treats a ditial camera or camcorder as a card reader.The flash memory card may just show up as another volume. From there, you should be able to do whatever you want.

Hi there!
I have a Mac and as everyone with a mac can tesify, it's awesome.

??!!??!!??!!??!!??

Well a few years back I had 2 Macs that gave me so many problems that I ended up having toget the rapir people through Mac(after driving 55 miles one way to the repair place they told me I had to use or play for my own repair) to do extensive data recoveryjust after 4 monthsand then as soon as the warrenty ran out it crashed and devloped many issues even though I never went on the internet with this machine, no viruses etc.I lost 3 months of photos because the CD-R drive failed and so did the replacement. They wouldn't replace my machine just repair it. Data recovery the second timecould not find any of my photos....... Also several of my old Mac friends (since chanced to the PC market) all had similar issues with Macs in the 2000 - 2004 era so Mac lost a lot of people......

Also I just ran a test on the one MAC G5 in the office and attached my Fuji S-9100 to it. Showed up as an external hard drive. So all you need to do is drag and drop photos from within the camera icon (external drive letter) onto your desktop or a folder on your desktop.

Just beause one camera works, doesn't necessarily mean that another will.

Most are USB Mass Storage Compliant, and most operating sytems support Mass Storage Compliant devices without any additional drivers. So, they'll show up as an external drive. But, some cameras are not (for example, many Canon models are not USB Mass Storage Complaint and use PTP for transfers instead). Some models allow you to change transfer modes.

I don't know what category this Panasonic model would fall into. But, if you can't get it to show up, just buy a card reader that's compatible with the type of media you're using (probably SDHC in your case). They're very inexpensive now.

I also don't know about video file compatiblity with IMovie. But, if it's not compatible, you may be able to find codecs that support it (or a conversion program to convert to another format).